Djebli Club: the Moroccan ecolodge raising social and educational consciousness

More than half of Moroccans are youth. And just like other young people living in Africa, they face political, social, and economic challenges. Despite all the efforts put into development projects throughout the kingdom, unemployment and poor quality of education persist.

Fortunately, ambition knows no limits. Every day, thousands of young ambitious Moroccans fight for a better life with creativity and strong determination.

Allae Hammioui is one of these ambitious youth that decided to stop hoping and start building positive change. After a few years in France working in the famous La Défense in Paris, he decided to go back to Morocco and start his journey as a social entrepreneur in the land of his grandfathers.

Djebli Club – the project’s name- is an ecolodge situated in a small village in the north of the country called Mokrisset. Hammioui met with Ambitious.Africa and shared his story.

HB: First of all, what does Djebli mean and what is Djebli Club?

AH: Djebli comes from the word “Djebel”, and it means “mountain” in Arabic. But it also comes from “Djebala”, which is a region in north Morocco that reunites three tribes established in the Rif Mountains. Djebli Club is a place I created in the small village where my father was born.

Mokrisset is located 3 hours from Tangier and is the same distance from Rabat, the capital city. This project’s first goal is to develop tourism in an unknown area of the country and promote education and culture among its youth.

In simple words, it is a hostel where guests can stay, enjoy nature, and offer educational workshops to the village’s youth. In an area where the lack of education is the biggest challenge, these workshops are needed.

Since its creation in 2015, Djebli Club has hosted more than 7000 guests from 32 countries. All these people contributed to providing science, art, and other soft skills training to the youth of Mokrisset.

This project is also an opportunity for our visitors to discover the local culture and contribute to the development of tourism in the region. In the beginning, this project emerged from a personal need to quit nourishing a cold system and start doing something that would give meaning to my existence.

HB: You started the project with not more than €1,500 collected via a crowdfunding campaign. Was that enough to build such a project?

AH: (laughs) No, it wasn’t, but it was enough to start something. Thanks to my family’s support, I had permission to use a parcel to start building the hostel.

It all started with me, a tent, and a backpack. Through the crowdfunding campaign, I collected €1,500 to buy a few construction materials. Then, I made a call to action on Facebook to my friends and community to find those who were interested in contributing to the building.

The number of people who answered the call was impressive. Each week, I had a different group of people coming from everywhere in Morocco to Mokrisset and lending a hand in preparing natural building blocks we would later use in building the rooms.

The village’s youth also helped me in building the Djebli Club. Nothing would have been possible without the active contribution of this community of youth full of energy willing to build this project from scratch.

After a few months, the first visitors started to come, and we’ve invested every penny we earned in building a more comfortable place. Today, besides the rooms, Djebli Club has a café, a small pool, a library, a music studio, and even a parking lot.

HB: What is the achievement you’re the proudest of?

AH: I’m proud that Djebli Club has gained the youth’s and their parents’ trust. Thanks to our hard work, we signed conventions with eight local schools to organize and facilitate workshops for young students.

The project has also gained the interest of local authorities and we’re working along with other local associations on a program called “Vision Mokrisset 2030”. This program aims to develop sustainable tourism in the region – particularly cultural tourism - and to build a strong civil society network in the area.

In only 6 years, Djebli Club has become a central actor in the development of the region thanks to the hard work of our teams and the engagement of both local communities and our guests. More than just a hostel, the project is a tool of positive change in a forgotten region.

HB: Do you identify as an entrepreneur?

AH: I am definitely a social entrepreneur. What started as a personal quest for meaning has become a tool of change in my region. The impact of Djebli Club on Mokrisset and its people is tremendous. The first impact is direct and easy to measure: If the 7,000 guests that spent a minimum of €10 in the village during his stay, this means that the project brought in €70,000 which is a lot of money in a poor region like Mokrisset.

Djebli Club has also had an impact on the visibility of the village. No one knew about Mokrisset before Djebli Club, and we have had so many media outlets, both national and international, that featured stories about the village in the last six years. But the most important impact remains social of course: thanks to guests’ workshops, local young kids discover new things such as artificial intelligence, robotics, music theory, and international literature.

Because of the poor education system, these kids would never have discovered these topics with practical exercises. On another level, this project is a powerful tool in fighting violent extremism, youth crime, and drug use. Thanks to this impact, we gained the trust of many international organizations and reinforced north-south cooperation.

HB: What’s your biggest ambition for Djebli Club?

AH: My biggest dream for Djebli Club is for it to be a notable artistic residency in Morocco. For me, Djebli Club is not the destination but only a tool to develop more projects in the region and why not in other regions. I want it to be a carrefour of development initiatives in Mokrisset and other villages. I hope that kids of the region will benefit fully from it and give back to their community in the future.

By Hicham Bekkali